Government Publishing Office Seeks to Modernize Capitol Hill’s Documentation Software

The Government Publishing Office, an agency that makes government documents available to the public, is looking into modernizing the documentation software used on Capitol Hill.

GPO supports all three branches of government and is responsible for producing documents such as U.S. passports for the Department of State as well as official publications of Congress, the White House and other agencies.

Hugh Halpern, director of GPO, said the agency’s new XPub software will serve as a “huge leap forward” in streamlining digital documentation functions, Nextgov reported Wednesday.

Halpern added that XPub will enable the development of a wider range of applications for federal government users. 

XPub will help shrink the administrative backlog brought about by the outdated printing and documentation software currently used for government websites like Congress .gov, Halpern said in a keynote speech at the Data Coalition summit.

GPO created XPub with the help of intelligent language and content creation company SDL. In December 2020, the company announced that it won a long-term agreement to replace GPO’s 30-year-old publishing system.

Based on the SDL XML Professional Publisher engine, XPub is a digital platform designed to help the agency manage congressional documents across digital and print formats.

SDL explained that SDL XPP is ideal for processing content from databases, XML editors, content management systems and structured word-processing files. 

The publishing engine is used by large organizations in content-heavy industries such as the legal and financial services sectors, SDL added.